Texas Architect Jan/Feb 2007: Spaces for Learning

Texas Architect Jan/Feb 2007: Spaces for Learning

Texas Architect is the official publication of the Texas Society of Architects, each edition features recently completed projects and other editorial content largely written by AIA members in Texas. That collective participation was the basis of Texas Architect’s recognition by the national AIA with a 2010 Institute Honor for Collaborative Achievement.

texas architect 10 1/2 2007 at Pointe du hoc in Normandy, France, teams from the center for heritage conservation at texas a&amp;M University have been recording and analyzing the battle-scared remains of the site of one of D-Day’s most heroic assaults. among their findings at Gun emplacement Number One was evidence of allied shelling and bombing in the days before June 6, 1944. the site is among the topics set for a symposium on the a&amp;M campus scheduled March 2-3. NEWS college s t a t i o n From out of the crucible of violence and heroism known as World War II arose what some call “the greatest gen- eration.” For the soldiers who fought its battles and the civilians who endured its hardships, the effects of that cataclysmic event continue to resonate more than 60 years later. And much like those who experienced the war first-hand, time slowly but inexorably undermines the physical remnants of that global conflict. In March, Texas A&amp;M University’s Center for Heritage Conservation will sponsor a sym- posium dedicated to the examination of places that connected Texas to WWII. Among those sites are a former U.S. Army Air Corps base in Bryan, a detention camp for German prisoners of war in Hearne, and the USS Texas deployed in the D-Day landings. Underscoring the interest in preserving the heritage of Texas in the Second World War are five major programs currently underway by the Texas Historical Commission. Those include a multi-year survey of places significant to WWII- era military and home-front activities, a series of historical markers to commemorate previ- ously unrecognized WWII sites, and special publications. In addition, the Texas Department of Transportation is undertaking a compre- hensive survey of the many general aviation facilities used as WWII training installations around the state. The interest of Texas A&amp;M’s Center for Heritage Conservation was driven in part by the residual effects of WWII on Dr. Richard Burt, a College of Architecture faculty member from Great Britain. He grew up surrounded by veteran soldiers – his father and his father’s friends – who rarely spoke of their wartime experiences, but whose lives had been altered by D-Day, the Desert Rats’ campaigns in North Africa, and POW camps in Japan. Burt’s passion for preserving this element of his own history reached a fateful juncture when he arrived in College Station and learned that James Earl Rud- der, the university’s president at that time, was a hero of the Normandy landing in 1944. The courage of Lt. Col. Rudder and his Army Rangers on June 6, 1944 has been the subject of documentaries and films. Their heroic scaling of Pointe du Hoc to destroy Nazi guns that com- manded the Utah and Omaha beaches belies description, and the site, now in the guardian- Symposium in March at A&amp;M Examines Conservation of Texas’ WWII Heritage ship of the American Battle Monuments Com- mission, is a much-visited shrine to those who lost their lives in the successful assault. Rudder’s men found themselves in a veritable moonscape of craters left by days of bombing and shelling, some of the latter being from the USS Texas whose guns fired round after round of 14-inch shells. [Now berthed as a floating museum at the San Jacinto State Historic Site near Houston, the mammoth WWI-era dreadnought represents another piece of wartime heritage threatened by decay.] Scheduled on March 2-3, the CHC sympo- sium will feature speakers to address aspects of their work with WWII heritage. For the past three years the Center itself has been undertak- ing studies of the Pointe du Hoc site in Norman- dy to establish a definitive physical evaluation of the extensive Nazi fortifications attacked by Earl Rudder’s Rangers, and to establish the geophysical condition of the cliffs, eroded by over ten meters since 1944, to provide data for the conservation and interpretation of the site. The symposium will include a major component on the recording and analysis of Pointe du Hoc by a team, led by CHC Associate Director Robert Warden, that includes historians, architects, civil engineers, and geotechnical specialists using a variety of conservation techniques. The first day of the symposium will take place at A&amp;M’s Riverside Campus, site of the former Bryan Army Air Base, a major WWII facility constructed in 1942 to train pilots in instrument flight. That March 2 session will allow participants to study long-span timber construction and the development of historic structure reports. To add verisimilitude to the experience at “Bryan AAFB,” attendees will be able to examine a privately held collection of WWII vehicles immaculately restored by Brent Mullins of the GI Museum of World War II in College Station. Also scheduled that day are guided tours of three military structures dating from the active periods at the base. Sessions on March 3 will be held at the Col- lege of Architecture’s Geren Auditorium and will cover issues of conservation technology. Of special interest will be a presentation on Randolph Air Force Base, referred to as “The West Point of the Air” and now a National His- toric Landmark with over 350 buildings, a talk on alternative strategies being considered to save the USS Texas, and the exploration of one of a POW camp at Hearne, just 12 miles north of Bryan, one of many such WWII camps that operated in Texas. david g . woodcock, faia the writer is a professor at texas a&amp;M university’s college of architecture and director of the a&amp;M’s center for Heritage con- servation. He also is a contributing editor of Texas Architect. For more information on the symposium, visit http://archone.tamu.edu/chc. court esy cen t er for Heritage co nservat io n